I found one under the christmas tree this morning. Came with firmware.1.11 so I figured I'd upgrade it. Got the latest, 1.28 from the website, put it on there, disconnected it. It started the upgrade process and now all I see is the loading screen with firmware version 1.11. Do the reset by holding the power button for ages and I get the same loading screen agian.

I can probably get it sorted out under warranty but.. I'm a bit annoyed and I'd like to sort this out if I can. Any suggestions?

Did you use a wrong file? Some firmware zips have a big file in the main folder (use this one) and a patches/ folder with small files, which you shouldn't use as they brick your device.

Unfortunately there is no way to recover either. The Story HD executes a script in its main memory on boot up, which doesn't help you any when the device already hangs during boot up, and if you didn't put a script in there beforehand.

You also have to be careful with hardware versions I guess, there is Wifi and there is Basic without Wifi. On the other hand the hardware of those is completely identical (save for the missing wifi component) so it's actually possible that the Basic firmware would run on a Wifi device (although I'd rather not try since doing so might brick it).

There are at least the four basic JTAG test points on the board so it might be possible to gain access to the devices flash storage using debug hardware, however I didn't have a chance to try this yet either.

Warranty (getting a replacement at the store where the device was bought) is probably the best option...

Hm, the big file shouldn't cause bricking, as long as you use the correct one for your hardware (Wifi vs. Basic). I assume you have the Basic since with Wifi you could just update over the air?

Did you disconnect the reader without properly ejecting / umounting the USB storage first? If so the file may have been corrupted on the reader, which in turn could be what caused the bricking. Always eject properly and check that the firmware file has the correct size after you copied it on the reader. If you want to make absolutely sure, I guess you could copy it under a different name so the reader won't start updating right away, eject/disconnect/reconnect, verify file size and checksum, and then rename it, eject it, update.

The device itself unfortunately does not do a proper verification of the firmware file. If it was properly made, a bricking of whatever kind should simply not be possible.

The only other thing that comes to mind is that you should never fill the internal storage to capacity. The reader needs some free space there so it can recreate its book database properly and have room for other operations also. Although unless you copied thousand books on your reader the very first day that can't have been your problem either.